A federal judge in Massachusetts indicated Friday that she will likely stop the Trump administration from ending Family Reunification Parole, a program designed to provide temporary legal protections to some relatives of U.S. citizens and green card holders while they navigate the immigration process. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani said at a hearing that she expected to issue a temporary restraining order, though she did not specify when the order would take effect.
Talwani’s comments came as part of a broader effort by the administration to end temporary legal protections for numerous immigration groups, according to the lawsuit described during the hearing. The case comes just over a week after another judge ruled that hundreds of people from South Sudan may live and work in the United States legally.
The program at issue is called Family Reunification Parole, or FRP. The plaintiffs’ arguments, presented at the hearing, described the protections as extending to more than 10,000 family members, and they said most of those recipients were set to lose their legal status by Jan. 14. Lawyers said the Department of Homeland Security terminated the protections late last year.
The suit involves five named plaintiffs, but attorneys said they were seeking a ruling that would apply to everyone enrolled in the FRP program. In filings and arguments described at the hearing, the plaintiffs said the people subject to FRP did not arrive in the United States “temporarily” in the sense of a short stay; instead, they said the program functioned as a jump-start to new lives that included employment authorization documents, jobs, and school enrollment for children.
Justin Cox, an attorney who works with Justice Action Center and represented the plaintiffs, argued that the government’s approach creates a sharp gap between what recipients were told or allowed to rely on and what the administration ultimately seeks to do. “The government, having invited people to apply, is now laying traps between those people and getting the green card,” Cox said. “That is incredibly inequitable.”
Cox’s argument was tied to the timing and effect of the termination. The case, as described in court, involves recipients from Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti and Honduras, with most affected recipients facing the loss of protections by Jan. 14. Lawyers said the plaintiffs want the court to treat the termination process as unlawful or at least improperly implemented.
The government, by contrast, defended the termination. In its brief and arguments in court, the government said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has authority to end any parole program and that the administration provided adequate notice by publishing the termination in the federal registry. The government also argued that terminating the program was necessary for national security reasons because the people were not property vetted, and it said maintaining FRP would divert resources from other immigration programs.
Katie Rose Talley, a lawyer for the government, told the court that parole could be ended without a broader legal requirement. “Parole can be terminated at any time,” Talley said. “That is what is being done. There is nothing unlawful about that.”
Talwani appeared to accept that the government can end the program, but questioned the way it did so. She said she took issue with how the administration notified affected people and whether the government showed adequate written notice beyond relying on publication in the federal registry. Talwani said she wanted the government to demonstrate how it alerted FRP recipients through a written notice, such as a letter or email, that the program was ending.
“I understand why plaintiffs feel like they came here and made all these plans and were going to be here for a very long time,” Talwani said. “I have a group of people who are trying to follow the law. I am saying to you that, we as Americans, the United States needs to.”
Lower courts have generally supported keeping temporary protections in place for many groups facing similar terminations. In May, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip temporary legal protections from hundreds of thousands of immigrants for now, which, as described in the hearing context, could expose nearly 1 million people to deportation. That decision lifted a lower-court order that had kept humanitarian parole protections in place for more than 500,000 migrants from four countries: Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
The Supreme Court action, as described, came after the court allowed the administration to revoke temporary legal status from about 350,000 Venezuelan migrants in another case. In the Supreme Court brief order, the justices did not explain their reasoning in the written order, and two justices publicly dissented.
In Friday’s FRP hearing, Talwani’s focus on notice suggested that even if the administration ultimately has authority to end the program, the court viewed the process for doing so as a live issue. The outcome will turn on whether Talwani issues the temporary restraining order and how broadly it would apply.